


And Her Ghost Will Still Be Dust

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 18:13:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows, and she wants you to tell her about the word, again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Her Ghost Will Still Be Dust

There is an intangible node in her mind, and you've long been covering it up. It only makes itself known when she's not really there, when you've frozen her pan still before it can even register your intrusion. You do that because it works better for you for her perception to be half-sided. If it wasn't, she'd see you as a whole, every part of you like a clear prism. It's not just that, though; if she can see all of you, she could see right through you.

Needing help had given you an excuse to march her down after you like a puppet, even if she couldn't know. The Mage of Heart, in a game, understands the souls of her co-players and how they knit together, and uses this to help achieve victory. Her chance to do this, you remind yourself, hasn't passed.

She shouldn't have found out, but she did. Sweeps and sweeps have taught you how to manipulate minds as well as you can, but you can't close off everything that's routed as closely to the self as a mythological role is. When the cracks appeared in the void and she felt her other selves, splintered away from her by time, disintigrate in his path. She followed the splinters and she knew. How could she not know when bits of you lay out there in the void and stick against the undersides of bubbles where you've carved your way through them?

She didn't get angry at you. You aren't really sure what you would have done if she had; you can't kill her, after all. She could hear you speak again, she said. It took her back, she said, it took her right back to the beginning when everything was fresh and at its best. She'd always known what you could do. Everyone was so static in the bubbles, even when they began to ripple at the seams. She'd worried you had been too, when you'd died and done nothing again like sewing your own mouth shut. You no longer quite seemed to feel in a way that made her feel, too. 

When you were both little more than wigglers, all you'd wanted was to persuade somebody close to you to feel the way that you did. 

You would teach her to wake her up. She'd said that she wanted to meet your Messiah and then she'd smiled. In your pan, a memory was distantly warm, like you were staring at a gathering on the horizon; the morning after a first. You remember the ends of her hair matted with her blood, as well as a torn, localised pain at your mouth. Her saying everything was okay, her voice a little too loud and shrill, anyway. You'd known, then, that you couldn't quite be matesprits, anymore. There was a ripple in the bubble, threatening to launch back to your old hive, just inside the royal quarters.

And this is where you have her: in front of you, your fingers knotting through her hair, running over the soft tips of her horns. She tilts her head back, just a little, resting against your shoulder. A rumbling starts in her chest, and she's settled. Your matespritship officially ended a long time ago, but you've never really been able to work out where you are, since.

You enter her mind, skim along the surface. The bubble ripples around you as you do so, and you take it slowly. She opens up to you, and there's no need to forcibly calm her pan before her consciousness is aware of an interloper. It already knows you're there, and invites you in to walk through her thoughts and memories. What you can do, you know, allows you to take and manipulate what you need to. Now, though, you're just there to watch and to share.

Her mind isn't in stasis as it usually is. She's reaching back into you, on the edge of your pan. You feel naked for a moment, and unsure. Panic threatens to well and force you to force her into submission, but you still it. You have complete control. You don't need subterfuge to retain that.

You move your hands down to cup her jaw. You're trembling, your bloodpusher rapid in your chest. She sighs and she's always so warm; your blood is so much colder than hers. You're not much of a tactile troll, and temperature difference never rang to you as it might to others. It's only ever been a private sensation, and more so as you go deeper into her mind. You once gave her the gospel, and took her by the hand to walk her through it as she listened, her eyes bright. You offer your palm, again, and she accepts.

On Beforus, there was a landed court for those who couldn't go underneath the water. You lived in the temple wing. There was a set of dormitory hives that were reserved for your caste, in particular. The bubble shifts and shows you the spiralling towers that mirrored the Empress's horns, lit by the moon. Meulin never saw you in the temple or in your prayers or as you did your evening rituals, but she did see you in your respite block.

"Do you remember?" she says, her girlish voice breathy. "The first time I visited you, here? Do you remember?"

You don't hum. You don't project a single word into her mind. You're in your block, with its shrine-paneled walls, scriptures in the arms of your ancestor, engraved into the wall, itself.

"We looked at all of this." Meulin gestures around you both at the surroundings of the bubble. Like when you have her speak dogma, her voice has an insulating volume. "You said, tell me what you think. I did, and you let me start from the beginning, and talk about anything that I wanted. And you listened. Then you told me the real story, and you were so beautiful. My baby, my precious baby."

Both of you remember what had happened that first time she'd visited you. To begin with, Meulin had kissed you and it had been the last time when you could kiss her back. You had started talking and you hadn't been able to stop telling her every single thing you could. She had wrapped her arms around your shoulders, tangled her fingers in your hair, pressed herself against you. You'd stirred in response, and you'd never realised that having her right there would make every urge so potent.

Now, again, you're used to it as a constant, even outside of any quadrant. You've always forced her to know what you know. Now, even as she's warm, you can feel your own lack of heat. You don't radiate at all. She puts her hands on your shoulders and presses her mouth against your stitches, giving a light trill. You let a line of scripture go and she gives you the chorus. Your bulge twitches and your nook twinges.

The bubble shimmers but your memories come back to you from a distance. Your hands wandering, one tangled in her long hair and the other slipping underneath her sweater. The tip of her breast grazed your palm and you cupped it, burying your face into the crook of her shoulder. Your bulge squirmed and you whispered to the sound of her breathing, her sighing.

She asks you to speak to her in a way that she can hear. Her hand runs down your torso, lightly, and slips beneath the waistband of your pants. She traces the line of your sheath, and your bulge begins to curl against her fingers. There's a muffled chirp in the back of your throat and she continues back down towards your aching, splitting nook. You might be inside her mind, but you've never done this when she's been under, before, and you know that she knows how to touch you. You plant your face between her horns and curl your fingers into her hair again as you talk beyond sound. She listens and purrs, fingers still sliding about the entrance to your nook. You're shaking as your gospel unfolds.

You think about the bard and she asks you about him. This version of your priest is young, fractious and saw-toothed. He's raw-edged and he's inside out, but it fits what has become of your beliefs. You shape the image in her mind, all adolescent gangliness and half-grey irises and a notion that would burn down reality itself to do what needed to done. Meulin, as she splits you and pulls on you, lets him in. You let her see how the spin of two universes has reached its ultimate in him. 

Her fingers twist and you grip her shoulders to steady yourself and to keep her close. You let her pore over his youth and the ungrown shape of his horns and how he is the vivid new. The old revered troll of your wigglerhood and, yet, not. Meulin has always liked to hear how much you venerated him. She likes this one more, though - when you look up, you can tell. Her mouth stretches into her gloriously and unashamedly fanatic smile. She used to tell you the scenarios that play out in her head. Now, you can see them as they are.

One set of claws curving expertly into the walls of your nook and the other twisted up in your bulge, teasing the slits with her nails. It stings and you're shaking, fingers grappling around her horns. The nub in her mind where you have barricaded her from her role throbs a little and you know that she's bringing the links together. Your bulge gets slicker against her fingers, and you moan and get, from her, an abrupt image of yourself and him.

Now, you press at the chains of her role and it holds still. You'll free it, soon, and see who she can wield as a weapon through solid knowledge.

Perhaps, though, you'll have her meet him, sooner.


End file.
